David Johnston is the MP for Wantage and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children, Families and Wellbeing
Why doesn’t Labour have a plan for childcare?
It can’t be because the people Labour MPs meet on doorsteps think childcare is unimportant. It’s one of the biggest costs facing families today.
That’s why this government is making the single largest investment in childcare in history, to give working families 30 hours of free childcare from when their children are 9 months old until they start school, saving them the significant sum of up to £6,500 a year.
There was a point when it looked like Labour did have a policy but were keeping it secret. Bridget Phillipson, the Shadow Education Secretary, suggested in an interview that her childcare policy would be “like the creation of the NHS”. That sounded like code for the mass nationalisation of the 60,000 organisations – mostly businesses and charities – that deliver childcare.
But then the awkward, and all too familiar moment came, when Labour said that that was, in fact, not going to be their policy at all.
Their lack of plan has manifested in the constant repetition that Labour will fund breakfast clubs in primary schools, as though this is a substitute for a childcare policy. And it ignores that we are already supporting thousands of children who need them most with free breakfasts.
Worse still, they’ve asked a former Chief Inspector of Ofsted to go away and try and produce a childcare policy for them. Given Ofsted is a regulator rather than a provider of childcare services – and every Labour MP stood on a manifesto to abolish the organisation both in 2017 and 2019 – policymaking at Labour HQ is really in a sorry state.
Look across Labour’s interventions on policy for children and young people and those who care about education will be worried.
In addition to abolishing Ofsted, Labour also wanted to abolish academy schools and SATs at the election. Their only memorable education policy since 2019 has also been one to tickle the bellies of the Labour left: to charge 20 per cent VAT on the fees of independent schools.
In a stark moment last month, the party conceded that this will even be charged to those families that have a child with special educational needs who is attending a special school for those needs, on the spurious grounds that not doing so would mean ‘any [independent] school could claim it is a special school’.
Just last week, research carried out by the Adam Smith Institute found that this ill-thought-out policy could cost the exchequer £1.6 billion. That’s before the additional cost of replacing the provision for children with special educational needs is calculated. This is a particular problem given Labour has already committed the money they claimed it would raise 6 times over.
On apprenticeships, Labour’s policy would cut the number of apprenticeships in half, slashing the budget spent on apprenticeships by £1.5 billion a year.
When Rishi Sunak rightly said he would crack down on rip-off degrees that leave young people with high levels of debt and low levels of employability, Labour said doing so would be “anti-aspirational”.
Having run organisations that helped disadvantaged young people enter university before I became an MP, I can say the only thing that is anti-aspirational is thinking working-class children should pay thousands of pounds to go to universities that do nothing for their prospects and be grateful for it.
Then there are schools. Michael Gove and Nick Gibb’s reforms revolutionised our schools with academies and free schools, curriculum reform, and phonics –culminating with us shooting up the international league tables from 25th in reading, 27th in maths and 16th in science under Labour, to 13th in reading, 11th in maths and 13th in science under the Conservatives. English primary children are now ranked the best readers in the Western world.
Meanwhile, Labour-run Wales, which Keir Starmer described as “the living proof of what Labour in power looks like”, has fallen to 33rd in reading, 33rd in maths, and 34th in science.
Faced with Conservative-run England having had such success in education policy, we had the extraordinary spectacle last month of Bridget Phillipson trying to pooh-pooh the rise in standards, saying education “is not a contest between nations, but a shared endeavour in every country and across our world to give children the very best start—not some of our children, but all of them.”
This attitude is a recipe for Labour doing what they always do when they’re in government: leaving unemployment higher when they leave office than when they enter it.
How can the person who wants to be Education Secretary not understand the competitive world we’re living in and how education is vital to this country’s success?
The problem with Labour not having an education plan is that we know it will be the teaching unions that fill the void. This happened during the pandemic, when Labour were against schools reopening until union demands were met. It’s why they want to water down accountability measures. And it is why in Labour-run Wales education standards have plummeted.
If Labour gets back into power, we can bet teaching unions will be resurgent, filling the void where Labour’s education policies should be with demands that our schools do what union leaders want, rather than what children and parents need.
Bridget Phillipson has said time and again her ‘top priority’ is reforming childcare. If her ‘top priority’ is an area where she still has no idea what her policy should be more than 4 years since the last election, parents should be very worried.
There is no clearer example that Labour has no plan than childcare. And there’s no better ‘living proof’ that they’d take us back to square one than what they’ve done to education in Wales.
The post David Johnston: Labour’s lack of a childcare plan is the latest sign they can’t be trusted on education appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: David Johnston MP
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